People all over the world have the feeling that things in society and the economy can not continue like they do now. Polution, hunger. illness, climate change, energy logistics and job loss are hurting people and their families personally and also whole communities are destroyed in the long time. Which should concern all of us.

Professor Dirk Helbing of the ETH in Zurich and TUDelft presented a number of these crises very clearly in his TED-Groningen talk in 2015, accessible on YouTube. He also showed several remedies and general direction of efforts which can help to repair the situation and can result in a transition to a new society. He called what is appearing “the Planetary Nervous System” (PNS).

2. My discovery: a NEW organizational paradigm.

I have discovered a pattern which can work which can be presented to start where Helbing in his TED talk stopped. I hope to achieve how the HOW question can be answered. Here you can download the PDF of my Flashtalk in Berlin where I presented it briefly: Salon am FinkelplJvTapril20 2018 I

The shortest introduction to my idea is that it applies the remarkable recent success of the “deep Neural Networks” in AI (derived from parallel pattern recognition in the brain) to an organizational structure to interconnect PEOPLE more successfully, than the ‘old power’ hierarchies. It is a well known way to innovate: use a recipe in one knowledge field in quite another field of practice or scientific discipline. That is what I did: throw a powertool over a fence into a field where it can be welcomed since there is a big need for it.

3. Here is how you can see what I did present

I suggest you download the PDF from the above link, open it AND open the video of my flashtalk in Berlin on another screen. {25 minutes} from Youtube https://youtu.be/aHcSbwUoN34

4. What next

The intention to write out the above presentation into a more lengty and more detailed paper or booklet, possible together with graduate students. It is my sincere hope that this discovery will lead to a number of scientific breakthroughs which will be applied in a constructive way.

May the Flow be with You !!!

Jaap van Till, TheConnectivist

PS.1 Today April 24, I was notified that somebody did come to the same conclusion, as expressed brilliantly at the chaos congress’ (#CCC) last keynote, in November last year. Charles Stross is talking about ‘slow AIs’ we used to call »corporations«. There are many
connections that could be drawn towards my ‘Weavelet’ presentation:

»I’m talking about the very old, very slow AIs we call corporations, of
course. What lessons from the history of the company can we draw that
tell us about the likely behaviour of the type of artificial
intelligence we are all interested in today?«

»It seems to me that our current political upheavals are best understood
as arising from the capture of post-1917 democratic institutions by
large-scale AIs. Everywhere I look I see voters protesting angrily
against an entrenched establishment that seems determined to ignore the
wants and needs of their human voters in favour of the machines.«

And now comes the twist: protesters are organizing themselves as a ‘fastAI’ in order to deal with the ‘slow AI’.

I love it to be confirmed in my views by a brilliant man !

PS.2 One of the key functions of a Weavelet organization is Orthogonalization = to sort a very complex set of observations into a number of orthogonal issues, issue sets which are agnostic to each other. This is in contract to simplifications that hierarchies do.

PS.3 A friend told me that my idea of a tightly interconnected group sharing knowledge I called a Weavelet is by no means new. In 1975 the famous graphic novel artist Marten Toonder published the story called “DE WEETMUTS”, about wire interconnected mushrooms that result in all “knowing everything the others know” : (part of first page)

PS.4 . For an more visual impression of the proposed “Weavelet” organization structure take a look at the following snapshot [ Ahmed & Rao “Orthogonal Transforms for Digital Signal Processing” Springer Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, New York 1975, p 83 ]

This is a structure which IMHO even sociologists, politicians and legal professionals can understand

]]>https://theconnectivist.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/the-way-ahead-new-power-synthecracy/feed/1broodjejaapSynthecracy Weaveletconnected ladiesweetmuts1975transformDemocracy, Is It Gone?https://theconnectivist.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/democracy-is-it-gone/
https://theconnectivist.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/democracy-is-it-gone/#respondThu, 12 Apr 2018 11:30:18 +0000http://theconnectivist.wordpress.com/?p=10588Continue reading →]]>From Twitter: see message below. Democracy is under attack by mass surveillance, profiling & personal targeting and ….. #mindfucking to create isolated excluded bubble groups that no longer interact or cooperate with each other and fight.

Democracy is much much more than just providing choices and “ruling by majority”. It is in the long term not bad to recognize & INCLUDE minority views from a diversity of people into the decisions. We should re-connect the diverse tribes.

This is BIG news !! If this is true, it can have a huge impact on health and happiness of the world population. WATER without pollution or salt is a basic need for children growing up, life, cooking and washing.

If it can produce potable water from dirty rivers or sea water, for instance with the help of solar energy such purifiers can be implemented on a large scale. And if you realize that many conflicts and even wars & migration have “fights over water” at their core, this is really great news. I have reblogged an article from “The Fastcompany” below about this invention.

I hope that the successful Nazava project, which is now operational with porous stone filters can adopt these new “graphene filters” soon and spread the filters on a larger scale.

One simple filter might be able to deliver clean water for a fraction of the cost and energy of our current purification and desalinization methods.

The water in Sydney Harbor–which is salty and polluted by sewage, toxic chemicals, and microplastics–isn’t drinkable. But researchers in Australia recently tested a new type of water filter that purified and desalinated the water in a single step. The same process could potentially be used to help the 2 billion-plus people around the world who lack access to safe drinking water.

The filter uses Graphair, a type of graphene, a material made from a thin layer of pure carbon. A film made from the new version of the material, with microscopic nano-channels, has a “unique atomic structure where the channel only allows pure water molecules to pass through while rejecting all the bigger particles of contaminants,” says Dong Han Seo, a researcher at the Australian research organization CSIRO. Salt, oil, chemicals, and other pollutants are blocked by the filter, while water flows through.

Typical large desalination plants use reverse osmosis, an energy-hogging process that uses high-pressure pumps to force water through membranes. The graphene filter can be used with a different process called membrane distillation, which runs on a difference in temperature between the clean and dirty water.

[Photo: CSIRO]

That thermal process could run on renewable energy. “Ideally, where we would love to see this going is you’re using solar power to heat the salty, dirty water, and that drives the production of the cold, clean water,” says CSIRO researcher Adrian Murdock. “You also should be able to achieve a much greater efficiency of clean water.”

In a recent study, a Graphair-coated membrane, roughly one square inch, could produce half a liter of water a day. The researchers are working on scaling up the membrane to the size of an A5 sheet of paper; a larger size should be able to produce 50-100 liters of water a day, or possibly more. “For a household, if you had two or three of these in series, that’s a perfectly reasonable volume of water to be producing,” Murdock says.

While membrane distillation already had advantages over reverse osmosis, it also has a challenge–over time, as they’re coated with pollutants, membranes stop working. In the recent study in Australia, the researchers tested a commercially available membrane filter coated with a Graphair film. Without the film, the filtration rate dropped by half in 72 hours. A membrane with the graphene film, by contrast, keeps working even as it’s coated with oil, detergents, or other contaminants.

Graphene filters also work more quickly, because the properties of the material increase the flow of water, despite the nano-sized pores. “Because graphene has an affinity to water, the amount of water going through the membrane is much higher than the commercial state-of-the-art polymer membrane,” says Rahul Raveendran Nair, professor of materials physics at Manchester University in the U.K., where graphene was first invented. Nair is also working on a graphene filter that can desalinate and purify water. His team is partnering with Icon Lifesaver, a manufacturer, to develop bottles with filters that could remove pollutants, heavy metals, and viruses.

Though the research is in a relatively early stage, it could potentially be an affordable way to produce clean drinking water. The CSIRO researchers have focused on a lower-cost, faster technique for making graphene, with fewer steps than others have used in the past. Their product is also made from soybean oil, making it more sustainable than graphene made from fossil fuels. In the future, the researchers say, it could be made with waste oil.

“We are trying to build a unit so it can be easily accessible in third-world countries,” says Seo. “A membrane that can enable single-step filtration of any kind of contaminants is a first step in bringing clean water to poor countries. Our team is continually researching and pushing our technology forward, eventually building our own purification system which is perfectly suited for our membrane.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world’s largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley

– We are constantly watched through internet (about 1 GigaByte per day) and the data resold and used to manipulate us for marketing (and for political manipilation: Cambridge Analytica and Palatir). And… nobody notices.

My conclusion: Mass Surveillance (for commercial use or by government departments for law enforcement etc.) is the first step in a process which leads to mass personalMental Manipulation (for boosting sales by consumers or influencing their choices at elections). This not only is an attack on our privacy (a Human Right, remember) but also on our Freedom and on Democracy, whatever that was. The Civil Society will fight back…… We are not powerless.

At last there is “New Power”, a book that describes how to bottom-up WEAVE Online Communities into swarms of Positive Participating People.

Cases are analysed in which people interconnect, participate, cooperate and contribute meaning that can be synthesised, so it creates value by synergy to all participants.

This can scale up into a type of society I call “The #Synthecracy”.

Its Message is in the Connections with Others.

jaap van till, TheConnectivist.wordpress.com

=========================================

PS1. Book will be published early April 2018, you can pre-order it at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

PS2. When asked for examples of successful participatory New Power projects, it is important to also mention two of them that are so massively penetrated (and still spreading like a living creature) on the planet that we take them for granted:

The Internet. And more specific, the HUGE worldwide digital infrastructure, built by scientists and engineers since 1983. This network fabric ‘behind the screens’ is relatively unknown by politicians and public and invisible. Most people have no clue what, how and why it is. Its formal definition can be found on these blogpages. That definition states that the Internet is an agreement to interconnect & transport data, voluntary made by owners of networks (with an ASN), which is in line with New Power definition of the new book. It is often confused with the WWW.

The World Wide Web aka WWW (1989). You probably do know what that is. The total collection of documents voluntary posted on Internet by their authors/publishers, which can be accessed by way of the Internet at their specified “online address” (URL).

PS3. We are witnessing the Revolt of The Connected Competent and their supporters, disobeying outdated hierarchies of established ruling classes. Who are these “competent”?: imagine the millions of Dilberts and Dilberettes declaring that their enslavement has been ENOUGH and start to cooperate online, based on TRUST and shown competence. These competent people do together the right thing at the right moment in the right place. Why? Because they can, and are extremely good at certain (very diverse) tasks, and they are curious & wanting to learn from doing and from their connected peers.

As TheConnectivist I highly recommend that you see this film “The Connected Universe” . It may change (or confirm) the mindset of your view on reality. From focussing on central “nodes” to focussing on the “links/connections” between them. Their DUAL !!

My newest #synthecracy slogan is: THE MESSAGE IS IN THE CONNECTIONS TO OTHERS

Prof. Dirk Helbing has published a remarkable set of constructive proposals for CHANGE to improve life on this planet and give society a shared vision to work on. I will post some of his publications below, but let me first give you my remarks on (1) the context and (2) why what Helbing proposes is urgent. (3) how my suggestions for structures, mindsets and ways to act & DO begin where Dirks leaves off.

(1) The Context

The winds are changing. Although it seemed until recently most people did not care much about political and social happenings, other than big catastrofies & memes with many deaths, certain events have triggered bottom-up movements of people “who do not want to take it np more”. Examples: #BlacklivesMatter , #WomensMarch and now #Emma4Change : in response to the school shooting in Florida. Other recent bushfires are the angry voter movements in Europe. These are labeled as ‘shifts to the right’ and silly successes of ‘Populist Politicians’ by ego-pumping media commentators, anchorpersons and the ruling establishments. But the angst and anger of the middle classes runs much deeper than that.

So why do people all over Europe vote for populist politicians?

Because these politicians are nationalist autoritarians, the Mussolini’s of our time, who promise to re-establish order under their strong leadership and a RETURN to the good old days of “industrial growth” of the 1970’s and STEADY JOBS with growth perspective (aka the American Dream). They can promise that, but those days are gone I am affraid. And even worse, both the LEFT communist/socialist parties ideologies and recipes for wealth creation and the right capitalist/ neo-liberal ideology of the Chicago Economics School and Reagan&Thatcher era; are NO LONGER WORKING. The financial crisis started in about 2008 is a social and economic crisis and we are still in it, And in a turbulent transition to a next phase which is by no means clear. The political establishments in many countries certainly have failed to have seen this coming and they are still react with useless old power measures. And they thought it to be clever in order not to be hunted out of their offices to put the blame for their failure on unexpected outside influences, reckless banksters (only those in Iceland where put in jail for their crimes) and …. foreigners and emigrants. Young non-brit professionals are openly addressed as Euro-Trash.

(2) Why are Helbing’s proposed changes Urgent?

Hate of foreigners feeds the populist slogans, but it does not solve anything if the NHS for instance is stripped of its foreign health workers. The problems with the crisis and jobs is based on much deeper changes in work, economy and technology. And finding solutions for those instabilities is very urgent.

Millions of people have angst for their jobs and accept that their effective pay has not grown (while productivity has grown) or even accept lower pay or temp jobs (NL: ZZPers) just to maintain their families. And they see their children struggle to get even temp jobs with low pay, even when they have a solid (but probably outdated) higher education. Robots, AI and IT system ‘digitalisation’ of business processes have and do replace a lot of repeatitive jobs in lower class but also in the middle classes. Think for instance of the huge amounts of office work with their dreadful meetings where millions of people now lead Dilbert like zombie workhours. Knowing that sooner or later their Kafka job will be replaced by computer systems. Not because they are inefficient but simply because many there add no value at all at their desk. And… they know it.

I have the blunt rudeness as a Dutchman to ask even very high managers and public officers, in the midst of their very time consuming and boring in-competence power-quarrels, : “Can you tell me what the added value of you personally and your department is ?”. Usually they react as if lightning has struck them. And then they do not invite me again, ever Their problem!

So one of the key questions of our time is, beyond you and your power is: How can we re-connect people to make a transition to jobs with new and evolving ways of Value Creation ???

In the first article below prof. Dirk Helbing outlines what can be done.

(3) I am working on a presentation to design a future vision on society based on a pattern which is running through all the change proposals of Helbing and is based on the forthcoming book New Power, which I will review in a few days in these blog pages. That vision starts where Helbing ends and can be summarized as:

Key to value creation is to make CONNECTIONS between people with deep effective skills, knowledge and abilities AND with a very diverse tribal background and differing point of view. These synthesis connections must enable cooperation and collaboration to solve problems in a constructive way, and in a manner where all contributors benefit and learn from each other. Such constructions can scale up and create New Power. I call this Synthecracy. More about this in the coming weeks I hope.

Part I: The Moral Duty of the Elites

Global disaster is not inevitable — if we re-organize the world in a suitable way.

A radical re-organization of major parts of our economy appears to be urgently necessary.

Claiming that our problem is overpopulation of the planet reveals lack of imagination.

=====

Faced with climate change, financial, economic and spending crisis, mass migration, terrorism, wars and cyber threats, it appears we are very close to global emergency.

Given this state of affairs, we are running out of time to fix the problems of our planet. Here, we present what should be decided during the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2017 and a reflexive preamble.

We acknowledge your efforts to improve the quality of life. However, these efforts have also caused a further increase in the consumption of resources and energy.

It appears that this is now driving our planet to the edge: Climate change affects the global water system, agriculture and the basis of the lives of billions of people. It causes environmental disasters, mass migration and armed conflicts. Moreover, it is estimated to threaten about one-sixth of all species on our planet.

There is still time

Nevertheless, global disaster is not inevitable — if we re-organize the world in a suitable way, as discussed below.

The lives of billions of people are at risk. It is the moral duty of politicians, religious, cultural, scientific and business leaders – in short: the elite – to avert likely disasters, humanitarian crises and ethical dilemmas as much as possible.

This requires bringing about the necessary changes of society on the way in a timely manner.

With the aim to “save the planet,” many have urged the world community to reduce carbon emissions drastically by 2030 and almost completely by the end of the century.

However, given that the world population has grown roughly proportional to global oil and gas consumption, such a drop would largely reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth for people — unless the reduction in carbon-based energy can be replaced by renewable energy in a timely manner.

New solutions needed

New solutions are needed not only for heating and transportation, but also for the chemical industry, because the production of plastic and fertilizer currently depends on oil. Altogether, a radical re-organization of major parts of our economy appears to be urgently necessary.

Even though philanthropy and engagement in responsible innovation have increased, this urgent transformation has not taken place to the required extent. To a considerable degree, this is because those who have “vested interests” in the old system have often obstructed change.

However, “vested interests” are no excuse for inaction or delays. Property and power imply responsibility. If this responsibility is not adequately exercised, power lacks legitimacy.

If people have to pay with their lives for “vested interests”, these interests clearly undermine the very basis of societies.

Human dignity, which underpins many fundamental values and human rights, is the imperative that all individual, political and economic action should be oriented at. It is the key value and central pillar of many modern societies and, according to many constitutions, must be actively protected by all means.

A final call to action

If humanity wants to bring a positive future or even a “Golden Age of Prosperity and Peace” on the way, we need to dramatically reform our basic societal institutions, e.g. the present financial and monetary system, our economy and society.

Even though it seems that the current organizational principles of our world have served us well for a long time, they are now often failing to deliver the right solutions early enough.

Within the current framework, time and again we got trapped in suboptimal solutions to complex coordination games, “tragedies of the commons” and problems of collective inaction.

In our highly networked cyber-physical world, linear thinking (the assumption that effects are proportional to their causes) and the ethics of small-group, face-to-face interactions in relatively simple settings are often leading us astray.

Fundamental change is inevitable. It seems that what needs to take center stage now is not how much money or power someone can accumulate, but how much he or she is benefitting others and the world. Apparently, our societies have largely lost track of this basic guiding principle.

A lack of imagination

Claiming that our problem is overpopulation of the planet reveals lack of imagination.

By now it is obvious that all traditional problem-solving approaches have failed to work.

Also, the attempt to revive historical forms of societal organization, empowered by Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, does not seem to work, as the recent experiences in various countries with technocratic Smart Cities approaches have shown.

However, if innovation within the current system is not sufficient, the system itself has to be reinvented and changed.

It seems paradoxical that – in times of an abundance of data and the best technology ever – centralized control attempts failed to boost our most advanced economies and societies to a new level of satisfaction and prosperity, sustainability and resilience.

The reason for this lies in the complexity of hyper-connected systems, in which processing power cannot keep up with data volumes and those cannot keep up with the combinatorial increase in complexity.

Such networked systems often behave in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways: Rather than the intended effects, one will frequently find side effects, feedback effects and cascading effects.

Artificial intelligence is not enough

Given these circumstances, centralized control attempts perform often poorly. Even the most powerful artificial intelligence systems will not be able to manage the overly complex and often quickly changing systems of our globalized world well enough.

As a consequence, a new, decentralized control paradigm is needed, which implies the need for modular designs, diverse solutions, and participatory opportunities.

Therefore, we need new ways of participatory decision-making as well as new designs of the monetary, financial and economic system. In the new framework we propose, co-creation, co-ordination, co-evolution and collective intelligence are the main underlying success principles.

Fascism is formally called “Autoritarianism” (= preference of a central strong man hierarchical rule; does that ring a bell?). Popular ‘populist’ politicians, who see themselves as the strong leader, and attack democracy, feed on the promises that authoritarianism make. Somebody who saw fascism rising to power in 1932 was the idealistic communist lady Clara Zetkin. Do we have to go through this terrible process again or have we learned from history? The signals are unmistakable all over the world: isolationist nationalism, weaponising of the police, starting new wars, promoting the NRA. controlling the info on Internet and mass surveillance.

Let me make clear first that I myself do NOT advocate a shift to Communism or Socialism. Both of them are as outdated in 2018 as Capitalism is. These political systems have failed, so we need a new shared mental model to get things working again. IMHO that is “Synthecracy”, which core approach is to CONNECT a wide diversity of uniquely skilled people, assisted by networked computers, to cooperate and solve local problems together. More about that in later blogs, but you can be sure its “beliefs” are 180 degrees opposite from fascism.

jaap van till, TheConnectivist

Revealing giveways are not difficult to notice in their speeches: “pure”, “cleaning”, “discipline”, “obey”, we/them, “superiority”, “race’. And sooner or later you are killed or behind barbed wire and the state is run by old corporate pigs.

======re-posted from a Tweet by @occupy.com and an article by Chris Hedges========

In 1923, the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin warned that the longer the stagnation and rot of a dysfunctional democracy went unaddressed, the more attractive fascism would become.

In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. Fascism, then in its infancy, was written off by many liberals, socialists and communists as little more than mob rule, terror and street violence. But Zetkin, a German revolutionary, understood its virulence, its seduction and its danger. She warned that the longer the stagnation and rot of a dysfunctional democracy went unaddressed, the more attractive fascism would become. And as 21st-century America’s own capitalist democracy disintegrates, replaced by a naked kleptocracy that disdains the rule of law, the struggle of past anti-fascists mirrors our own. History has amply illustrated where political paralysis, economic decline, hypermilitarism and widespread corruption lead.

Zetkin’s analysis, eerily prophetic and reprinted in the book Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, edited by John Riddell and Mike Taber, highlights the principal features of emerging fascist movements. Fascism, Zetkin warned, arises when capitalism enters a period of crisis and breakdown of the democratic institutions that once offered the possibility of reform and protection from an uninhibited assault by the capitalist class. The unchecked capitalist assault pushes the middle class, the bulwark of a capitalist democracy, into the working class and often poverty. It strips workers of all protection and depresses wages. The longer the economic and social stagnation persists, the more attractive fascism becomes. Zetkin would have warned us that Donald Trump is not the danger; the danger is the growing social and economic inequality that concentrates wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and degrades the lives of citizens.

The collapse of a capitalist democracy, she wrote, leaves those in the working class disempowered. Their pleas go unheard. Reforms to address their suffering are cosmetic and useless. Their anger is written off as irrational or racist. A bankrupt liberal class, which formerly made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, ameliorating the worst excesses of capitalism, mouths empty slogans about social justice and the rights of workers while selling them out to capitalist elites. The hypocrisy of the liberal class evokes not only a disdain for it but a hatred for the liberal, democratic values it supposedly espouses. The “virtues” of democracy become distasteful. The crude taunts, threats and insults hurled by fascists at the liberal establishment express a legitimate anger among a betrayed working class. Trump’s coarseness, for this reason, resonates with many pushed to the margins of society. Demoralized workers, who also find no defense of their interests by establishment intellectuals, the press and academics, lose faith in the political process. Realizing the liberal elites have lied to them, they are open to bizarre and fantastic conspiracy theories. Fascists direct this rage and yearning for revenge against an array of phantom enemies, most of them scapegoated minorities.

“What weighs on them above all is the lack of security for their basic existence,” Zetkin wrote of the dispossessed working class.

“Masses in their thousands streamed to fascism,” she went on. “It became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. … The petty-bourgeois and intermediate social forces at first vacillate indecisively between the powerful historical camps of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. They are induced to sympathize with the proletariat by their life’s suffering and, in part, by their soul’s noble longings and high ideals, so long as it is revolutionary in its conduct and seems to have prospects for victory. Under the pressure of the masses and their needs, and influenced by this situation, even the fascist leaders are forced to at least flirt with the revolutionary proletariat, even though they may not have any sympathy with it.”

The discredited ideals of democracy are replaced by a hypernationalism that divides the population not by class but between the patriotic and the unpatriotic. National and religious symbols such as the Christian cross and the American flag are fused under fascism. Fascism offers the dispossessed a tangible enemy and a right to physically strike back. Those demonized for a nation’s decline—Jews and communists in Nazi Germany, the kulaks in the Soviet Union and the undocumented, African-Americans and Muslims in the United States—become social pariahs. The stigmatized, along with intellectuals, liberals, gays, feminists and dissidents, are attacked as the embodiment of the disease that has destroyed the nation and will be exorcised by the fascists. This fascist rhetoric is always couched in the language of renewal and moral purity.

“[W]hat [the masses] no longer hoped for from the revolutionary proletarian class and from socialism, they now hoped would be achieved by the most able, strong, determined, and bold elements of every social class,” Zetkin, a close friend of the murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, wrote. “All these forces must come together in a community. And this community, for the fascists, is the nation. … The instrument to achieve fascist ideals is, for them, the state. A strong and authoritarian state that will be their very own creation and their obedient tool. This state will tower high above all differences of party and class.”

Zetkin, a cofounder of the radical Spartacus League, cautioned against demonizing the rank and file of fascist movements. She reminded us that only when the real and profound grievances of those attracted to fascism are addressed can they be pried from its grip.

“The best of them are seeking an escape from deep anguish of the soul,” she wrote of those who joined fascist organizations. “They are longing for new and unshakable ideals and a world outlook that enables them to understand nature, society, and their own life; a world outlook that is not a sterile formula but operates creatively and constructively. Let us not forget that violent fascist gangs are not composed entirely of ruffians of war, mercenaries by choice, and venal lumpens who take pleasure in acts of terror. We also find among them the most energetic forces of these social layers, those most capable of development. We must go to them with conviction and understanding for their condition and their fiery longing, work among them, and show them a solution that does not lead backward but rather forward to communism.”

The highest aesthetic of fascism is war. Its veneration of militarized force and violence, its inability to deal in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity, and its emotional numbness leave it unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Institutions that pay deference to complexity, that seek to cross cultural barriers to communicate and understand others, are belittled and destroyed by fascists. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One obeys, both internally and beyond the nation’s borders, or is crushed. This moral and intellectual vacuum leads fascists to overreach, especially through military adventurism and imperial expansion. They begin long and futile wars that drain the depleted resources of the nation while eradicating civil liberties at home. And in the end, they practice a brutality inside and outside the nation that is genocidal.

Fascism, Zetkin wrote, pits one segment of the working class against another. Last year at the Charlottesville, Va., demonstration that turned deadly, the “antifa” activists and neo-Nazis who clashed came largely from the same dispossessed economic stratum. The divisions created within the working class by fascism, coupled with fascism’s attack on unions, intellectuals, dissidents and the press, foster an uneasy alliance with the capitalist elites, who often view the fascists as imbeciles and buffoons. In essence, much as Trump has done, the capitalists are bought off by fascists with tax cuts, deregulation, the breaking of unions and the dismantling of institutions that carry out oversight and the protection of workers. The expansion of the military, which provides capitalists with increased profit, coupled with the expanded powers of the organs of internal security, binds the capitalist elites to the fascists. Their marriage is one of mutual convenience. This is why the capitalist elites tolerate Trump and endure the international embarrassment he has become.

“There is a blatant contradiction between what fascism promised and what it delivered to the masses,” Zetkin wrote. “All the talk about how the fascist state will place the interests of the nation above everything, once exposed to the wind of reality, burst like a soap bubble. The ‘nation’ revealed itself to be the bourgeoisie; the ideal fascist state revealed itself to be the vulgar, unscrupulous bourgeois class state. … Class contradictions are mightier than all the ideologies that deny their existence.”

“The bourgeoisie needs to use aggressive force to defend itself against the working class,” she wrote. “The old and seemingly ‘apolitical’ repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state no longer provides it with sufficient security. The bourgeoisie moves to create special bands of class struggle against the proletariat. Fascism provides such troops. Although fascism includes revolutionary currents related to its origin and the forces supporting it—currents that could turn against capitalism and its state—it nonetheless develops into a dangerous force for counterrevolution.”

“Fascism clearly will display different features in each country, owing from the given historical circumstances,” she wrote. “But it consists everywhere of an amalgam of brutal, terrorist violence together with deceptive revolutionary phraseology, linking up demagogically with the needs and moods of broad masses of producers.”

In 1932 Zetkin, at 74 the oldest elected member of the Nazi-controlled Reichstag, was by tradition supposed to open the first session of the legislature. She was an object of vitriol in the Nazi press, which attacked her as a “Communist Jew,” a “traitor” and, as Joseph Goebbels called her, a “slut.” The Nazis threatened her with assault if she appeared in the chamber, threats that led her to quip she would be there “dead or alive.” In poor health, she arrived at the Reichstag on a stretcher but at the podium recovered her familiar fire. Her 40-minute speech was one of the last public denunciations of fascism in Nazi Germany. Within a year, the Nazis banned the Communist Party and Zetkin had died in exile in the Soviet Union.

She told the Reichstag:

“Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back fascism. All the differences that divide and shackle us—whether founded on political, trade-union, religious, or ideological outlooks—must give way before this imperious historical necessity.

“All those who are menaced, all those who suffer, all those who desire freedom must join the united front against fascism and its representatives in government. Working people must assert themselves against fascism. That is the urgent and indispensable precondition for a united front against economic crisis, imperialist war and its causes, and the capitalist mode of production.

“The revolt of millions of laboring men and women in Germany against hunger, deprivation, fascist murder, and imperialist war expresses the imperishable destiny of producers the world over. This destiny, shared among us around the world, must find expression through forging an iron-like community of struggle of all working people in every sphere ruled by capitalism.”

Barlow passed away on February 8, 2018. He was a great inspirator for freedom of expression online and coined the name “Cyberspace” (the worldwide Civil Society community of online connected people, freely imagining & sharing & creating thoughts and ideas), for which he wrote the Declaration of Independence, which he reads on the above video.

Essential is to understand that Cyberspace is located between the ears of you and me, where nation state governments and their institutions/law enforcers/politicians nor media & advertisers in corporate online platforms; have NO jurisdiction.

jaap van till, TheConnectivist

PS. The Golden Rule that JPB refers to is: The principle of treating others as one would wish to be treated. It is a maxim of altruism that is found in many religions and cultures. The maxim may appear as either a positive or negative injunction governing conduct: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself. Essentially it means that in such cases self-interest = general-interest, since being kind / helping others will turn back on you sooner or later. Good for your karma to be appreciated.

There was a great story explaining this from the middle ages. A very holy monk was allowed by Petrus when he passed away to briefly visit Hell before he would enter Heaven. Hell was a very very long table filled with delicious food and on both side long rows and rows of angry people who stabbed and fought each other with very long knives and forks, trying to feed themselves. Heaven was exactly the same !! But in this case each person at the table asked those sitting next to them: “what delicious morsel can I cut for you and feed you?”

This lecture agrees very much with many of the blogpages I posted here the last couple of years and I agree with the direction this will lead us, if we want to survive : [holographic connected collective intelligence with distributed authority]. Others, like the P2P Foundation have showed the way towards this too in forms of organisation called local (city) COMMONS aka Cooperatives. Other smart self-organising structures are (big)city-areas and resilient & future-proof open infrastructures for transport, energy-exchange and communication switching and transmission.